The Rise Of The Younger CMO

“I hope this comes across the right way, but I think the 20-year marketing veteran would have a very difficult time today at a startup in B2B marketing,” said Kennada. “This world feels two years old. This is all so brand new.”

Kennada is just 28. But he is hardly unique when it comes to being a relatively young head of marketing — at least in the fast-moving technology space.

“One theme I do see at startups, regardless of what stage you are or how much money you’ve raised, is the new type of marketing head is much more in tune with the tactics,” added Hana Abaza, 34, VP of Marketing at content marketing platform Uberflip. “The 20-year veterans kind of lost touch with that a long time ago. But without understanding the execution, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to scale growth.”

Kennada and Abaza are among the younger breed of B2B marketing leaders who are leveraging the explosion of technology tools that offer an unprecedented ability to get their message in front of targeted audiences as well as show their impact on businesses.

“There is no playbook for what we’re doing right now,” said Vajre, 36. “You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. So I don’t think of age as a limiting factor in any way. In some ways, I feel that the older you are, the more baggage you have.”

The concept of youth being served, of course, is hard-wired into the psyche of the tech community. Young visionaries launching innovative companies are an integral part of the startup culture ethos. At the same time, marketing heads have tended to fit the profile of seasoned professionals.

The emergence of marketing technology, though, has become a game-changer.

Scott Brinker, the CTO at ion interactive and blogger at chiefmartech.com, said he’s not aware of any research examining ages of marketing leaders. But he agrees that it makes sense that tech startup CMOs probably tend to slant younger.

“All the evidence is pointing toward tech- and data-savviness at the top of the list now for marketing executives,” Brinker said. “I’m careful not to infer anything about age from that. But I do believe that folks who have been doing marketing for awhile and don’t have the technology-data mix, they have to make the conscious decision to embrace it. The new generation of CMOs who grew up with digital marketing natively just have it as part of their gestalt.”

New-Waterson, 35, was speaking at The Marketing Nation Summit conference last spring when a vice president of sales made a comment about his job title at the Big Data company BloomReach.

“They say marketing technologists will become the next CMOs,” she told him.

“Funny you should mention that,” New-Waterson responded. He had just accepted that position at LeanData.

Making It To The ‘Big Kids Table’

There have been a few awkward moments along the way. “I’ve had a couple of times of not being sat at the ‘big kids table,’” he said. “Once it was in a literal way at a dinner of CMOs because I wasn’t quite old enough to sit with the older executives.”

Sodan Selvaretnam, the CEO of Chia Ventures, Inc., has written extensively about the making of the next generations of CMOs. He believes this is an interesting time for the CMO position.

“There’s definitely a dramatic shift happening in the market,” Selvaretnam said. “Historically, chief marketing officers have been focused on the idea of brand. But when you go with a traditional CMO, if they’re not willing to dive into the tech and data, they’re sorely missing out in the current marketplace. So what these four young CMOs are saying is applicable.”

But, Selvaretnam added, it still would be considered a risk to have a younger CMO at an established company.

“I presume the majority of CMOs who hold the reins of power are not 28 years old with just a tech background,” Selvaretnam explained. “They’re usually people with 20 years of experience. What it ends up, for me, is the mindset. It’s not an either-or equation; it’s a ‘both’ equation. Does experience matter? It matters.”

Brinker is well-known for his annual Marketing Technology Landscape graphic – which currently contains 1,876 companies. That, more than anything else, may explain the rise of the young CMO.

And it’s why, Kennada added, youth might be an advantage because younger CMOs have no assumptions about how there’s an established way of doing things.

“That old world doesn’t exist anymore,” Kennada said.

Mark Emmons is the staff writer at LeanData. He previously was a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, the Orange County Register and the Detroit Free Press. He also is the author of "The Last Chance Ranch."